Gardening and landscaping work, whether performed commercially or for personal use and enjoyment, often involves substantial physical effort. Specifically, transplanting or setting out seedlings and other small plants in the ground in a garden or landscape has required repeated bending and straightening by the person setting the plants. The physical activity associated with gardening can be physically difficult for many persons to perform and is tiring even for those physically able to perform the work.
Efforts have been made to reduce the level of physical activity associated with gardening, including the introduction of mechanized equipment designed to perform certain gardening functions. As an example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,090,456 to Morrison, Jr., et al., discloses an apparatus for automatically opening furrows in soil, placing seeds in the opened furrows, and then closing the furrows. An apparatus for opening a furrow, placing a continuous tape containing seeds or newly germinated bare root plants in the furrow, and closing the furrow is disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 4,829,915 to Ahm. While effective for their intended purposes, neither the Morrison, Jr. apparatus nor the ahm apparatus enable a user to set individual plants or to set plants that have development much beyond seed germination.
A manual device that may be used for placing seeds is disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 4,011,612 to Atkinson. The Atkinson device is a combination lawn and garden implement that is adaptable to the performance of several common gardening tasks and includes a hollow enclosed handle and a furrow opening blade. The device may be used to set seeds by dropping the seeds through the handle of the device into a prepared furrow, but the design of the device precludes its use for setting growing plants.
There remains a need for a device for and a method of setting individual plants in individual locations determined by the gardener without the need to stoop or bend to place each plant in the ground.